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Long story short - i cut my finger pretty badly and needed stitches. I was assigned a 3rd year medical student to do the suturing. Very pretty and east Asian (as am I, well the latter anyway!).
It was clear she was nervous and not very experienced - she frequently went to check with her senior to see if she was doing the procedures correctly. She also fumbled somewhat with the needle and had to retry several times. I thus tried to make her as comfortable as possible by engaging her in conversation, which went pleasantly. Found out she did a Ph.D. then into MD, so I probed about her motivations and when and how she decided on her career goals, and this went on. Vice-versa as well, as I'm a current grad student so we were in a sense sharing war stories. She has probably a few years on me give or take (I'm 25). One extra element was that my mum was beside me (she drove me to ER) but her command of English is minimal.
So as she opened up the privacy curtains and finished up I teased her about how she might just make it in this line of work, and this is when a rather obese middle aged nurse arrived on the scene and joined in the teasing. Well this probably being my last chance to make anything happen I casually stated "well you're probably really busy, but maybe we should hang out".
As soon as I said that I felt the palpable change of SPAM - like "shit just got real" and the two of them plus the senior doctor there put on a somber, grave face. The nurse immediately said "thank you, goodbye" in that disapproving matriarchal tone; and my target's face went flush red and she walked briskly away to stare down at a notepad at a desk. My mum was of course watching it all unfold with much amusement ; )
Persistence is a quality but I figured I probably shouldn't disrupt an ER of all places so I just left it at that. A rather unusual type of opportunity so I thought I would share it here and see if anyone has insightful feedback about what I perhaps could have done differently?
Gaming in an er. Ahh that's different, not bad though haha good work. I'm an afc so Idk what you should've done differently done. Only thing I can see is the cultural issue: asians (anywhere from japanese, indian sri lankan, chinese to korean, etc) as far as I've seen are conservative (not all of them: excuse me if I seem racist, I'm not trying to be) and she may not have been used to being picked up so she left. But I can see it as she might have been grossed out by the stitching and stuff and didn't want to remember that again.